Arival Accel Self-Guided Tours Forum: What Happened Over This 2-Day Event

Our participation in this year’s Arival Accel as hosts and speakers of numerous talks and workshops at the Self-Guided Tours Forum was a great success. If you didn’t attend the Arival Accel series of focused online learning and community events, take a glimpse of what happened on 2,3 March 2021. We are proud sponsors of the Arival Accel Self-Guided Tours Forum 2021 and we are looking forward to the next one.

Even though this two-day event was held virtually, we had the opportunity to meet with acclaimed professionals of the tourism industry, attend intriguing presentations and exchange opinions. There are many things that we keep from these two days but what we’re extremely grateful for is that we had the chance to listen to the experiences, struggles and successes of tour operators, travel agents, tech providers and OTAs over the past year.

Listening to their stories and sharing ours not only was quite inspiring but helped us see what we can do from our side to further support people of the tourism and the culture industries affected by the pandemic.

Recovering from the Covid-19 effects is a common goal and we strongly believe we must support each other in these times. Therefore, we decided to offer more favorable terms to third-party partners that create a self-guided audio tour in collaboration with us. We are confident that self-guided audio tours will empower many workers of the tourism industry as they are a noteworthy secondary revenue stream. Therefore we want to make them accessible to everyone.

Moreover, we met with remarkable OTAs and we took their suggestions and predictions under consideration. Hence, we’re adding even more new destinations to our portfolio. We were already planning to expand to 20 new countries with 100 audio tours of various destinations by the end of 2021 and we are now happy to announce we’re adding even more.

Bringing travelers back to the museums, cultural institutions and archaeological sites has always been our objective and is now more important than ever before.

Clio Muse Tours workshops and roundtables

During the two half-day Self-Guided Tours Forum, Clio Muse Tours held in total three roundtables, one workshop and one Innovation Lab. Our aim was to offer a proper insight into tour making and distribution covering every aspect of the process, from writing immersive content to developing cutting-edge technology tools.

Our Head of Content, Christina Ntaltagianni and Clio Muse Tours’ co-founder and CFO Daphne Tsevreni, led the “Creating Great Content” roundtable discussion. This forum took place both days and attracted 26 and 33 attendees respectively. Being the coordinator of most Clio Muse cultural projects and an accredited researcher, Christina delved into the important steps of content creation that make a self-guided tour intriguing and easy to follow. From storytelling methodology to photos and videos, Christina broke down the process and answered participants’ questions.

Daphne took it from there explaining why self-guided audio tours are beneficial for tour operators and how they can be a secondary revenue. Creating an immersive self-guided audio tour is the first step but distributing via the right channels is an important part of the process. Leading Clio Muse OTAs network since 2014, Clio Muse Tours’ CFO and co-founder was the right person to explain how it is possible to gain an income from a self-guided audio tour.

Their workshop “Curation for the Curious: Content & Usability Considerations for Self-Guided Experiences” answered questions such as “How much do travelers want to be looking at their phones? How much additional content is really needed? How should you design tour instructions? ” There are many things that while often overlooked, are the significant bits and parts that make a successful self-guided tour.

Clio Muse Tours has an award-winning storytelling methodology that was developed in collaboration with prestigious museums. Using the feedback we receive from our customers as well as the statistics we collect from each tour, we make sure to improve, enhance and enrich the way we create content and we are happy to share this knowledge with our partners.

On “How to choose a self-guided platform,” forum which attracted 38 participants, Clio Muse Tours’ co-founder and CTO, Yiannis Nikopoloulos talked about the steps you have to take before start creating a self-guided tour. Finding the right platform that suits your subject and customer base and running some tests before creating the final project is more important than you’d think. Yiannis has played a vital part in the development and update of Clio Muse Tours’ authoring tool, CREATE and reservation system. He knows what makes a platform user-friendly and why not all of the technological tools fit everyone.

At the Innovation Lab “A Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Tour on a Self-Guided App,” Yiannis went deeper into the technical part of a self-guided tour creation. He analyzed the dos and don’ts and answered the questions of 102 enthusiastic attendees.